Philipp Jakob Spener - An Advocate Of Holiness

In this article I am going to briefly trace a movement and see how God can use one man to start a chain of events. In this article I am going to look a little bit at Philipp Jakob Spener and Pietism. Spener is known as the Father of Pietism, this was a movement in Germany, that was really part of a larger move of the Spirit of God calling His people to holiness and practical Christianity.

In France this movement was lead by Calvinistic Roman Catholics called Jansenists. In Germany, the Lutheran holiness movement was called Pietism, this influenced the Moravians, Zinzendorf was Spener’s god-son, who in turn influenced John Wesley and the Methodists and Alexander Mack and the Brethren.

These groups differed greatly in some respects of their theology, but what they all had in common emphasis in a need for a personal holiness and obedience to God in the daily walk of life.

Phillip Jakob Spener was born in 1635 in Upper Alsace. In 1651, he went to Strasbourg to study. After his studies he became a tutor, before visiting other universities in Basel, Tübingen, and Geneva.

He returned to Strasbourg in 1663, and became a lecturer. In 1666, He became the chief pastor of the Lutheran church in Frankfurt. Here in 1675, he wrote the work which gave Pietism its name, Pia desideria, or Earnest Desires. He underwent a lot of opposition and persecution for his beliefs. The one which apparently upset the orthodox Lutheran academics of his day most was that one needed to experience regeneration before you could truly be a theologian. The fact that this was so controversial shows something of the state of the church in Germany at this time.

In 1686 he encouraged August Hermann Franke in his dream of a Collegium Philobiblicum, in which graduates met for regular and systematic Bible study and exegesis of the Scriptures in a practical way. In 1694, he helped to found the University of Halle. In 1695, the theological faculty in Wittenburg charged him with 264 various theological errors, the disputes dragged on and ended only with his death in 1705.

His influence and the influence of Pietism lived on. It was largely responsible for George Muller’s work among orphans, as well as all the other movements I mentioned earlier.

Here are His six main proposals he made in Pia Desderia:

1. the earnest and thorough study of the Bible in private meetings, ecclesiolae in ecclesia ("a church within the church").
2. the Christian priesthood being universal, the laity should share in the spiritual government of the Church
3. a knowledge of Christianity must be attended by the practice of it as its indispensable sign and supplement
4. instead of merely didactic, and often bitter, attacks on the heterodox and unbelievers, a sympathetic and kindly treatment of them
5. a reorganization of the theological training of the universities, giving more prominence to the devotional life
6. a different style of preaching, namely, in the place of pleasing rhetoric, the implanting of Christianity in the inner or new man, the soul of which is faith, and its effects the fruits of life.

With that I close.